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Re: Guns Kill

I'm sorry, I have to troll just a little bit here, "Guns don't kill people, husband who come home early do".

As a serious rebuttal to your "Guns are made to kill", you are correct guns are designed to kill. They kill people, Bears, Lions, Gators and quite frank anything that gets in their way. I want you to try killing a Bear with a stick, tell me how that works out? People talk about how we should do away with weaponry and it's nonsense, weaponry was developed over thousands of years to protect humans from dangers.

What Japan does well, is have an extensive registration system to determine gun ownership eligibility. It is much more scrutinizing than the US.

That being said...the culture of the US other countries that disallow handguns to its citizens are quite different. What you are in effect saying is "Since other countries disallow guns and they have lower gun crime rates, the solution to the US gun crime rates is to disallow guns."

The problem with that is that those countries have always disallowed guns, or were never in a place in which guns were ever popularly held by its citizenry...ever. You can't just go from 100mph to 0mph in an instant. Merely saying that the US ought not to have guns is not the solution for it just begs the question as to how we should go about doing that. If we were to use the ill-thought out plan by anti-gun groups, the result would be catastrophic.

1) Most of the current law-abiding citizens who own guns would of course, turn them in. But NONE of the criminals who actually do the vast majority of shooting people with guns would. In other words, this would not solve the problem of gun crime because it is focusing on the WRONG group of gun owners. In addition, some of those original law-abiding citizens would keep their guns out of principle. There is no way to get all the guns off the streets from the wrong hands, merely by saying "OK, starting tomorrow everyone turn in your guns." I've not seen a SINGLE anti-gun advocate think past this point, and it is why they have such bad arguments...they simple don't think about what they are saying.

It's like saying "In order to reduce speeding accidents, let's just make everyone not speed!" It's hardly a "brilliant" idea and IMO, just exposes the lack of effort that went into thinking about the position.

2) Law-abiding citizens are now at an increased risk of being harmed since they do not have sufficient protection against criminals with guns. While at one time it could have been a deterrent or even a sufficient reaction, now that citizen has become a victim. There's nothing to stop an armed criminal from breaking into a home while armed because odds have significantly decreased that the home owner has a gun.

3) The economy, which is already screwy, would be adversely affected. It's a $4.1 billion / year industry. Many people would adversely and immediately affected as well as local markets harmed....all for what? For a failed pseudo-solution to solve crime.

If you (or anyone else of course) are against gun ownership, that's fine. But at least reason out the argument a bit. Simply saying "We should get rid of it because X, Y, Z" is NOT a solution. It is nothing more than saying "We should get rid of murders because people die." Hardly a compelling argument.

Instead, focus on HOW we could get rid of guns and then that can be tied into your reasons as to WHY we should.

-=]Apokalupsis[=-Senior Administrator-------------------------I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend. - Thomas Jefferson

Re: Guns Kill

Gun control can control guns but it can't control crime. It just hasn't been very effective in the US and internationally the statistics show that both countries with few guns and countries with many guns can have low crime rates, and that countries with few guns and countries with many guns can have high crime rates. In short, the relationship between wide use of guns and crime is not very close.

What seems to really count is culture. If you have a culture of following the law and being obedient, you have little crime. If you have a culture of outlaws and criminal enterprise, you have plenty of crime.

I don't think gun control that seeks to remove guns from the culture will work in America, I do think there is a reasonable place for registration and licensing laws that are not aimed at stopping people from having guns but are aimed at reducing the ability of criminals and the mentally ill at getting weapons. I also think some regulations limiting what kinds of arms you can have is appropriate.

Guns are tools for killing (and in rare cases only for target shooting). Regulations should not be at making it hard to kill with a gun, it should make it so it is hard to kill indiscriminately with a gun. Ultimately we must rely on peoples responsibility not to kill one another.

Re: Guns Kill

Apok, I sincerely disagree with the idea that most gun owners would turn in their guns if some law started tomorrow that stripped us of our 2nd Amendment rights. Of course this is nothing but an anecdote, but I think such an action would be akin to the "shot heard around the world" and many, many people would adopt the "Come and get it" approach, me being one of them, and it would put into place a series of events that would lead to a civil war. There is no way in hell, I would ever, for any reason, under any threat of punishment, surrender my right to defend myself and my family against "bad guys" and against this government. I have a strong feeling that I am not even close to being alone on that front.

I will no longer be replying to any post from a Liberal going forward. I will continue, as normal, to discuss topics and engage in intellectual exchanges with non-leftist

Re: Guns Kill

Perhaps. I don't know for sure. But I'd be surprised if most would keep their guns despite guns being outlawed. Regardless, I don't think this changes my response to the original argument.

-=]Apokalupsis[=-Senior Administrator-------------------------I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend. - Thomas Jefferson

Re: Guns Kill

What a topic for debate. Here's some history about Australia. In 1995 gun ownership was fairly legal, i use this term loosely as I was quite young at the time. In the same year a person armed with automatic weapons went on a killing spree at Port Arthur in Tasmania killing 35 people and wounding numerous others. Contrary to the opinion that people kill people, not guns, Prime Minister Howard was elected at the next election and became the second longest serving PM in Australian History. 1996-2007.

Quote from Wiki: Early in the term Howard had championed significant new restrictions on gun ownership following the Port Arthur massacre in which 35 people had been shot dead. Achieving agreement in the face of immense opposition from within the Coalition and some State governments, was credited with significantly elevating John Howard’s stature as Prime Minister despite a backlash from core Coalition rural constituents.

One of his first moves as PM was to round up everyone's guns. This is not the core of the issue, let's have a look Martin Bryant-

A. He was diagnosed with intellectual difficulties.
B. His father committed suicide shortly before the shooting due to a bad real estate deal.

It's unclear whether he was planning a shooting spree anyway, as he had already purchased an AR-10, but he was significantly traumatized by his father's suicide relating to the sale of land in Port Arthur. Effectually amongst strong opposition John Howard defeated former PM Paul Keating in an election where the main debate was gun control. In my mind this debate is just implausible as it mentions "people" but not the different build of their minds and the environmental effects that have been worn by them.

So considering this, could the debate be- Do guns kill people or should we find some magical way of determining a person's emotional availability for common sense? Not just when they purchase the gun but for their whole entire lives!

Re: Guns Kill

I don't think it's common sense to kill people simply because you were traumatized. Maybe he should have looked into therapy. If he was traumatized, why kill a bunch of other people for no reason? Maybe he should have killed himself. By the way, I hope he was executed.

It's the simple things in life that really count; you can enjoy them and relish every moment, just don't expect them to do the dishes.

Re: Guns Kill

Knives kill people, too... so do sticks, poisons, fires, broken bottles, fists, and pieces of piano wire. Does that mean we should also outlaw cutlery, trees, chemistry, glass bottles, martial arts training, and pianos? I guess that would mean our next visit to a nice steakhouse with an in-house musician would involve some sort of papyrus or plastic menus, cutting our steak with totally blunted but harmlessly serrated bits of wood or plastic, drinking beer out of plastic bottles, and listening to... some guy doing soulful, unaccompanied jazz saxophone for our ambiance. Without candles... because fire's harmful, too. Oh... and scratch the plastic... because chemistry would be illegal too, so people can't make and use poisons to hurt each other.

If the basis of your argument for outlawing guns is to eliminate the possibility for an inanimate object to be used by one person to kill another, then the above scenario is the logical conclusion of your argument. There's no other way around it. Either you are committed to the idea that all things that can be used to harm other people should be illegal, or you're just making some arbitrary and baseless distinction between different kinds of random inanimate objects without any real reaason except you don't like them.

Sorry... your argument has another serious flaw, too. Even if it were possible to totally eliminate one means by which a person may harm another, people would just find another way to harm other people. And that's not including the somewhat preposterous notion that we could somehow absolutely eliminate guns in the United States, which shares a totally porous border with a country rife with guns, corruption, violence, and people willing to deal in illegal things. Sorry... your position is totally untenable. Even if we *could* eliminate private gun ownership in this country, the people would revolt before actually allowing the Draconian measures to be put in place that would actually enable the government to confiscate so many millions of weapons.

And as Apok astutely pointed out... all that would do is absolutely ensure that the only people who have guns are the ones that are inclined to use those guns to break the law and to harm other people.

Re: Guns Kill

Originally Posted by Clicky

I'm sure everyone here is familiar with the debate whether guns kill or people kill. I believe guns kill and here are my reasons:

In order for guns to kill, it would seem to me that they would have to be sentient and have the ability to exercise a will. From empirical observation, I have not observed such a phenomena -- except maybe in sci-fi movies.

Responsibility and accountability are simple virtues in our world, but we seem to like to complicate them. When we can't fix man-made problems in society we try to use bandages or somewhat irrational assumptions to justify managing the issue instead of just dealing with the heart of the problem.

Let's not forget about cars, stairs, prescription and OTC medications, bathtubs, and swimming pools--we need to outlaw those....
And while we're at it we should prohibit production of all fatty foods and alcoholic beverages,too...

Re: Guns Kill

It is a weapon that kills people (e.g.- guns, knives, car, bomb) but where youre wrong is assuming that all guns kill people, correct me if I'm wrong OP but seriously read what you've posted. It's a simple cause and effect scenario---> you aim a gun at someone and pull the trigger, they tend to die as an effect. The gun just does not grow a will of its own and go on a shooting spree... Correct my ignorance if I am found to have some

Re: Guns Kill

Why does everybody keep saying they do not have wills? I never said that. I just said they kill. I know knives and stuff kill, but not nearly as often. As a side note, I am aware people kill, but most of them resort to shooting. If I'm not mistaken, weapons like Guns can be long range, but knives, you would have a chance to escape if you saw somebody running at you.

It's the simple things in life that really count; you can enjoy them and relish every moment, just don't expect them to do the dishes.

Re: Guns Kill

Originally Posted by Apokalupsis

Perhaps. I don't know for sure. But I'd be surprised if most would keep their guns despite guns being outlawed.

I don't know man. People have a hard time giving up what they have. It's one thing to be denied access to something that you don't have; it's very different to have to surrender something that you do have. It's not like pot being illegal keeps people from getting their bud, or that prohibition kept booze under control, or that the Pope saying contraception is a "sin" discourages Catholics from using birth control. I think de-legalizing guns in this country would at a minimum be the catalyst for violent civil war.

Re: Guns Kill

Originally Posted by Dionysus

It's one thing to be denied access to something that you don't have; it's very different to have to surrender something that you do have. It's not like pot being illegal keeps people from getting their bud, or that prohibition kept booze under control, or that the Pope saying contraception is a "sin" discourages Catholics from using birth control.

And another thing about prohibition is that it makes those who don't abide by it outlaws. Many, if not most, people who smoke pot (I'm using that as an example because it's the most popular as well as innocuous substance that is banned) are otherwise law-abiding people and are only outlaws because they aren't obeying that one law. And it's the same for guns. If you make them illegal, you make outlaws of people who are otherwise law-abiding. And such prohibitions lead to the less respect for the law amongst the population since fewer will agree with the rule of law.

Re: Guns Kill

Originally Posted by Clicky

Why does everybody keep saying they do not have wills? I never said that. I just said they kill.

But they don't kill Clicky. A gun out of the manufucture's shop does not kill. It's just a gun. It has the potential to be used to kill; it has the potential to be used to harm someone; it has the potential to be used for self-defense; it has the potential to be use criminally, it has the potential to be used for hunting game, it has the potential to be used to deter a threat. But a gun is just a gun. Potential of how it's used does not by defult make a gun kill.